Crossing the River

So begins Caryl Phillips's superb new novel: a voice speaking out of a distant past, describing the consequences of his desperation - his daughter and two sons condemned to the hold of an English slave ship bound for America in 1753. What follow are the stories of these children: Nash, Martha and Travis. Yet as the narrative unfolds, we come to understand that although they are his children, they are also all of slavery's children: Nash, returning to Africa in the 1830s a Christian-educated adult, a missionary to the new territory of Liberia, slowly becoming a part of the world his 'masters' intended him to convert ... Martha, her own daughter and husband sold away from her, settling in the American 'wild west' of the late nineteenth century, freeing herself from slavery but never from the weight of 'such misery in one life' ..